Nick McPhail: Aberration

Aberration presents two new bodies of work from artist Nick McPhail. Created through recent material experimentation, the new paintings and handcrafted ceramic vessels are representative of the artist’s evolving conceptual focus on spatial perception, memory, and temporality.

In addition to his ongoing painting practice, McPhail has recently developed a new series of hand-built ceramic vessels that explore how image and form can interact in three dimensions. These sculptural works often begin with a domestic reference point—most commonly the shape of a milk jug—that anchors each piece in a familiar or utilitarian form. The artist then wraps each vessel in imagery drawn from real or remembered landscapes, using a painterly approach that resists fixed perspective. As the imagery bends and folds around each form, it takes on a perceptual fluidity - mirroring the way the world is experienced not as static, framed images, but as something seen in motion, filtered through memory and physical presence.

 

This body of work pushes McPhail’s practice into a more sculptural and architectural realm, while still remaining grounded in painterly concerns of surface and color. It creates a new vocabulary through which the artist can explore how place, memory, and perception interact.

The second, more expansive body of work, is McPhail’s most recent painting series. Here, the artist experiments with layered imagery that compresses multiple places, temporalities, and modes of seeing into a single visual field. His process has become slower and more durational, allowing time itself to become a structural force in the work. Rather than beginning and completing a painting in a single arc, he returns to each piece over weeks or months, letting accumulated memory and new visual impressions guide the evolving composition.

McPhail’s new approach allows memory to surface more freely—often in unanticipated ways. Images shift, dissolve, or return in altered forms, and the final works become records not just of place, but of the experience of remembering place, intertwining time and perception. Through his process, McPhail explores how a painting can hold not one fixed moment, but multiple temporalities—layered, and at times, unresolved.

Nick McPhail graduated with a BFA with a focus in Painting and Ceramics from Michigan State University in 2006. He has been selected for numerous artist residencies, including those at Maple Street Construct in Omaha, NE in 2025; Amélie Maison d’Art in Paradou, France in 2022; Untitled_1983 in Geneva, Switzerland in 2019; the Holiday Forever Residency in Jackson, WY in 2019; Ochi Gallery in Ketchum, ID in 2019; 100 West Corsicana in Corsicana, TX in 2018; and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT in 2017, and was chosen as a Hopper Prize Finalist in 2023.

McPhail has exhibited internationally in San Francisco, Richmond, Paris, Los Angeles, Geneva, Düsseldorf, Arles, Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, and New York City, among others. Additionally, the artist’s work has been featured at The Dallas Art Fair, Untitled, the London Art Fair, the Seattle Art Fair, and Future Fair’s presentation at Villa Tigertail in 2025.

In 2019, the artist’s commissioned public work, Power Lines, was permanently installed on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park (measuring 12 feet by 10 feet and painted in acrylic on aluminum). The artist and his work have been published in noteworthy publications including New American Paintings (Issue #175 curated by Jerry Saltz), San Diego Magazine, Style Weekly, Literary Hub, Wrap Magazine, The American Scholar, Art Now LA, Booooooom, Art Maze Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Two Coats of Paint, San Francisco Chronicle, and Art Business. His work is found in the permanent collections of Morgan Stanley in New York City, Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, and the Center for Ethics at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.